As we enter February, our collective focus on Liberating Love turns toward Justice and Equity. In our efforts for love and justice, I invite you to wonder about how we extend those efforts to our youngest and smallest friends and members! 

To make worship irresistible for people of all ages is a labor of love and justice. When we intentionally center joy and equity in our community, we nurture all of us and don’t we all deserve to love being here? Don’t we all have the right and the responsibility to “make this earth a heaven” for ourselves and our whole community?

This is why we plan a multigenerational worship service each month to build trust, model wonder, and invite everyone into shared worship. This is why we experiment with other resources and tools, like the new Interactive Order of Service we introduced on 1/28. When we intentionally make worship more engaging and accessible for everyone (including children), we work towards justice and equity. Our community is our future.

RE Updates

• Speaking of the future, the YRE Winter Giving Project is going great! RE friends helped out at Manna in December and January, brought monetary donations to RE, and shared about other ways they’ve donated money, time, and energy to causes they care about. We also practiced democracy in our preparation to vote for a Share the Plate partner to whom we’d like to donate our collection. 
• The middle and high school youth group overnight event Con-Noodle is coming soon! We are hosting youth from other congregations to join us as we explore UU values and ideas around love, empowerment, trust, and pasta! We would love your help with feeding these hungry teens: sign up here to donate something. 
• We are building a team to bring Our Whole Lives (OWL) Sexuality Education to our community this year. This is especially pertinent to justice and equity  because sex-ed is under attack in Florida. We’ll have a Zoom meeting soon to talk further about the following:
  • We have opened registration for a free middle school/high school program called FLASH this spring. Sign up here. 
  • In the summer, we’re hoping to offer a camp built around elementary OWL. In the fall, we’d like to offer grades 7-9/10-12 OWL. Let me know if you want to help! 
• Finally, as we discuss making a heaven on this earth, I’d like to invite you to Date with Death Club, a monthly Adult Religious Exploration program starting 2/8. This exploration empowers participants to look at death with creativity, reality, and curiosity. We’d love for you to join us!